The present invention relates to apparatus for recording a video signal, and has, for its object, the provision of a video tape recorder which reproduces an image free from unwanted signal components.
Conventional video tape recorders which are extensively used for various applications are of the helical scan type in which the magnetic tape is scanned by rotating heads at skewed angles. In particular, household video tape recorders are made compact by the use of high-packing density techniques. For example, video tape recorders of the VHS type employ a rotary cylinder of 62 mm diameter and a pair of video heads mounted at 180 degrees apart from each other on the circumference of the rotary cylinder for recording video signals along tracks which are slanted to the longitudinal direction of the recording tape. Furthermore, for video tape recorders of the type exclusively for broadcasting use, such as the one used for editing news programs (a portable type known as the type ENG), wherein the compactness and light-weight are of the primary concern, use is made of a magnetic tape having a width of 1/2 inches. Such broadcasting-use video tape recorders are of the U-standard video tape recorders which are required to meet not only the compactness and light-weight requirements but also high picture quality requirements. With the 3/4 inch U-type video tape recorders of the broadcasting applications, use is made of a cylinder having a diameter of 110 millimeters. This size of the cylinder coupled with the fact that it uses 3/4 inch tapes makes it difficult to reduce the overall dimensions of the video tape recorder. Furthermore, the method for recording video signals involves removing the low frequency component of the frequency-modulated luminance signal and recording it with a low-frequency converted color carrier signal. This imposes limitations on available frequency bandwidths for the luminance and chrominance signals and as a result video signals for satisfactory color reproduction for broadcasting applications are difficult to achieve. The primary factor that affects the picture quality is the introduction of a third-order distortion noise caused by the hysteresis characteristics of the video heads and magnetic tape.